Saturn devours his children

Regardless of the legality of the process, donation of aborted foetal tissue for research purposes is not new. But in an era of increasingly commercialised biotech research, renewed attention to this macabre relationship between research, capital, and abortion is appropriately disturbing.

Since I started working in bioethics some eleven years ago I’ve preferred to err on the side of explanation; that is, I believed that most people were poorly informed about the issues we studied, and even more poorly informed about the methods provided by our ethical heritage to deal with these issues. The best thing to do was therefore to explain them as best I could, so that anyone sincerely wanting to understand could do so. But increasingly I think we’re seeing issues reach a point where, to apply an old heuristic of mine: if you find yourself having to explain the obvious, it’s probably pointless.